The Hubble Space Telescope has come out with a new ultra deep field image — this one in the near-infrared, taken with the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) that was installed on the latest servicing mission. Colors are fake (obviously, unless you have infrared vision), but the spirit of the colors has been preserved — red regions are redder in real life, etc. Click on the image for a higher-resolution version (about 1.6 MB). Even higher resolutions available at HubbleSite.
Not too different, to the naked eye, from previous incarnations of the ultra deep field. That’s okay. I can sit and stare at these images for hours. Every one of those blobs is a galaxy! Holy crap.
December 9th, 2009 at 2:45 am
Sort of gives Sagan’s words “b-b-billions and b-b-billions” a little more meaning….
December 9th, 2009 at 3:51 am
There’s likely a civilization or two out there. Was. “Is” wouldn’t even make sense over those distances. My head hurts.
Anyway, I hope an inherent propensity for relatively short-term thinking didn’t destroy too many of them. Or worse – ideologues with unwarranted extremes of faith in bartering or the supernatural.
I may be projecting.
December 9th, 2009 at 5:44 am
Are the spirals ancient or are they foreground?
To David: I doubt that there are any civilizations out there in the far field. Carbon mostly hadn’t even been invented yet! Maybe not planets either.
December 9th, 2009 at 8:18 am
What a sad day it will be for all mankind when they call Hubble home. It has given us so very much.
December 9th, 2009 at 8:39 am
The spirals are mostly foreground. As you go further back in time the galaxies look less and less like
the Hubble Sequence. Elmegreen & Elmegreen 2005 ApJ
http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/-link=10658589/0004-637X/631/1/85
December 9th, 2009 at 9:33 am
Has anybody ever noticed the similarity between the frothy [filament/void] structure of the galaxy distributions and the frothy [filament/void] structure of high energy plasma particle distributions, like one clearly sees in the Crab Nebula, or other SN events.
Or perhaps I should say: how can anyone not see the obvious analogy, especially physicsts who purport to study nature.?
December 9th, 2009 at 10:16 am
Faster, deeper, longer, older.
December 9th, 2009 at 3:25 pm
Sean- your last two words made me smile, and remind me of how trivially we weak lensers throw out galaxies left and right that we don’t want contaminating our sample, or won’t give us a good shape measurement or whatever — it’s all straight statistics to us, but i do sometimes sit and think — oh cripes, those are entire *galaxies* that we’re tossing without a second look, into the recycle bin. *Galaxies*, man.
How much hubris we humans have sometimes. yet, i gotta get the mass profiles done, so i can’t think on it in a philosophical sense ever *too* much. ;-> -M
December 9th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
Doh. Maybe not too many (civilizations) then. How old would the youngest galaxies in the image be?
December 9th, 2009 at 7:55 pm
As I look at this image, I seem to perceive a donut shaped distortion…a ring pattern of tighter clustering of galaxies, with looser clustering dead center and in each corner corner. Is it an artifact of the “lens” or some variation of gravitational lensing?
December 9th, 2009 at 8:32 pm
Dave H. – following Sean’s link youngest are at 600 million years, mere babies. It seems pretty early for anything like life and maybe even planets, but there had been supernovae and hence there were some heavy elements.
December 9th, 2009 at 11:39 pm
Ach, my bad – that’s not what I meant. I know there are those from 13bn years ago. I meant newest. Nearest to our age.
December 10th, 2009 at 12:01 am
I guess by choosing a region so dark at short exposures pretty much all the galaxies would be very old. Our solar system is “only” 5bn years old, so there probably isn’t even a small village hidden in that image, as you said.
Not that the image needs that anyway! – I was just preoccupied at the time.
December 11th, 2009 at 5:29 am
What if we are really alone – and – No One else is out there ?
December 13th, 2009 at 7:13 am
espero que no encuentren “bichos” tan destructivos como los humanos